ARTICLES 5 VIEWPOINT REVIEWS John Cage. Oedipus Rex. REPORTS COMMUNICATIONS

110 Pages·2016·14.17 MB·English

Edited by EMILY SNYDER LAUGESEN
ARTICLES
CLAUDIO ANNIBALDI 5 Froberger in Rome: From
Frescobaldi's Craftsmanship to
Kirchner's Compositional Secrets
DAVID GRAMIT 28 Lieder, Listeners, and Ideology:
Schubert's "Alinde" and Opus 81
SIMON HARRIs 61 The Evolution of the Byzantine
Hypakoae (Responds) of the
Church Year
VIEWPOINT
JOEL GALAND 79 The Turn from the Aesthetic
REVIEWS
JUDY LOCHHEAD 98 James Pritchett. The Music of
John Cage.
PIETER VAN DEN TooRN 103 Stephen Walsh. Stravinsky:
Oedipus Rex.
REPORTS
JUDITH BLEZZARD 112 Performance and Study in
Liverpool-New Venues, New
Opportunities.
SIMON P. KEEFE 117 Royal Musical Association
Conference.
GRETA OLSON 121 Hong Kong: Present Directions and
Thoughts About the Future.
129 COMMUNICATIONS
AUSTRALIA
Mary Chan University of New South Wales, Kensington
Graham Hardie University of Sydney
Margaret]. Kartomi Monash University, Clayton
Andrew D. McCredie University of Adelaide
AUSTRIA
Eva Badura-Skoda Editor-at-Large, Vienna
BELGIUM
Anne-Marie Riessauw State University of Ghent
Philippe Vendrix Universite de Liege
CROATIA
Stanislav Tuksar University of Zagreb
DENMARK
Henrik W. Larsen Copenhagen
ENGLAND
Stephen D. Banfield University of Birmingham
George C. Biddlecombe,Jr. Royal Academy of Music, London
Judith H. Blezzard University of Liverpool
John Caldwell University of Oxford
Tim Carter Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Egham
David Charlton Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Egham
Geoffrey A. Chew Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Egham
Nicholas Cook University of Southampton
Barry A. R. Cooper University of Manchester
Jonathan M. Dunsby Editor-at-Large, Reading
Mark Everist University of Southhampton
Anthony Ford University of Hull
Frederick Hudson University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Andrew Jones Cambridge University
Christopher Kent University of Reading
Nicholas Marston University of Oxford
Thomas Messenger University of Surrey, Guildford
Susan K Rankin Cambridge University
Nicholas Sandon University of Exeter
Benedict Sarnaker Goldsmiths' College, London
FRANCE
Olivier Delaigue National Conservatory
Serge Gut Universite de Paris-Sorbonne
Nasreen Hussein Universite de Paris-Sorbonne
GERMANY
Jeffery Bossin Technical University, Berlin
Albrecht Schneider University of Hamburg
Herbert Schneider University of Heidelberg
Hubert Unverricht Katolische Universitiit, Eichstiitt
HONG KONG
Greta Olson Chinese University of Hong Kong
ITALY
Fabrizio Della Seta Conservatorio "A. Casella," L'Aquila, Rome
Gabriel M. Stein schulte Pontificio Istituto de Musica Sacra, Rome
NEW ZEALAND
Gerald R. Seaman University of Auckland
NORTHERN IRELAND
Piers Hellawell Queen's University of Belfast
PORTUGAL
Manual Carlos de Brito Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Salwa EI-Shawan Castelo-Branco Universidade Nova de Lisboa
REPUBliC OF IRELAND
Harry White University College, Dublin
RUSSIA
Lev Ginsburg Muzykal'naia Zhizn; Moscow
Galina V. Grigorieva Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory
Rimma Kosacheva Government Institute of Theatrical Arts, Moscow
Nelli G. Shakhnazarova Scientific Research Institute of the Arts, Moscow
SCOTLAND
Christopher D. S. Field University of Edinburgh
Raymond Monelle University of Edinburgh
SWITZERLAND
Max Luetolf University of Zurich
WALES
David R. A. Evans University College of North Wales at Bangor
David WynJones University College, Cardiff and the Open
University, Cardiff
Froberger in Rome: From Frescobaldi's Craftsmanship
to Kircher's Compositional Secrets*
By Claudio Annibaldi
If the lack of information on Froberger's life is undeniable, so too is
the lack of scholarly research in this area. Indeed, all the documents
concerning his two visits to Rome were found accidentally by scholars
researching other subjects. One such example is the financial records
testitying to Froberger's service at the Viennese court. What has enabled
reference books to tell us that he studied in Rome with Frescobaldi be-
tween September 1637 and April 1641 is the disappearance of his name
from the Viennese records during that time.! However, the records in
question were discovered more than a century ago, not by a Froberger
biographer but by a scholar researching the history of the imperial music
chapel in Vienna-Ludwig von Kochel, author of the Mozart catalogue.2
Another example is the two extant letters from Froberger to Athanasius
Kircher, a learned German Jesuit living in Rome who included Froberger's
fantasy super ut re mi fa solla for harpsichord in his gigantic musical treatise
Musurgia universalis (1650).3 From a biographical standpoint, these letters
* An earlier version of this article was read at the Colloque International Jean:Jacques
Froberger: au carrefour des musiques europeenne du XVIIeme siecle, Montbeliard, France,
2-4 November 1990, and a shorter version at the conference La musica aRoma attraverso Ie
fonti d'archivio, Rome, Italy, 4-7 June 1992. I wish to thank the former archivist of the
Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, Father Vincenzo Monachino, for allowing me to study and
photograph the items of the Carteggio kircheriano discussed below; my colleagues rvonne
Ekman and Norbert Dubowy for their helpful comments; and my student Natalina Gammelli
for her research assistance.
1 See e.g. the Froberger entry for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed.
Stanley Sadie 6 (London: Macmillan, 1980),859.
2 Ludwig von Kochel, Die kaiserliche HofMusikkappelle in Wien von 1543 his 1867 nach
urkundlichenForschungen (Vienna: Beck'sche Universitiits-Buchhandlung, 1869; rpt Hildesheim:
Olms, 1976),58.
3 This fantasy, which was the only piece of Froberger's published during the composer's
lifetime, appeared in Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis sive Ars magna consoni et dissoni
(Rome: Corbelletti-Grignani, 1650), rpt ed., Ulf Scharlau 1 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1970),466-
75. The encyclopedic contents of the ten books into which Kircher divided his treatise are
detailed in Scharlau's foreword to the facsimile edition, particularly pp. iv-x. Partial tran-
scription and photographic reproduction of the two letters are included in Scharlau, "Neue
5
6 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY
are of critical importance, as they testifY that another extended absence of
the musician from the imperial music chapel between October 1645 and
April 1653 included many trips to Italy, Germany, France, England, and
the Netherlands and that one of these journeys led him back to Rome
before September 1649. These letters, however, were discovered and first
interpreted by a scholar interested not in Froberger's life but in Kircher's
theories of music-Ulf Scharlau-who concluded from the first letter, if
with some caution, that Froberger spent his second stay in the papal city
studying with Giacomo Carissimi, an interpretation that has been adopted
in a number of summaries of Froberger's life in dictionaries, monographs,
and editions of his music.4
The present study aims to ascertain, through Roman archival sources,
whether Froberger actually studied with Frescobaldi in 1637-41 and with
Carissimi in 1645-49. On one hand, in fact, thus far we have lacked any
evidence verifYing Froberger's presence in Rome before Frescobaldi's death
in 1643. The Viennese sources testifY only that the former was allowed to
go to Rome to study with the latter, not that the teaching in fact ever took
place; nor can hard evidence be found in the well-known passage from
Kircher's Musurgia in which Froberger is mentioned as "an organist of the
Emperor and a former student of the famous organist Girolamo
Frescobaldi," for the Musurgia was written almost a decade later-after
Froberger's second visit to Rome in the late 1640s.5 On the other hand, an
apprenticeship with Frescobaldi is thoroughly consistent with Froberger's
career as virtuoso keyboard player and composer of instrumental music,
whereas an apprenticeship with a master of the Roman oratorio such as
Carissimi would be inconsistent with not only his career and musical out-
put but also the long-standing separation of vocal and instrumental music.6
Quellenfunde zur Biographie ]ohann]akob Frobergers," Die Musikforschung22 (1969): 47-52,
and Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) als Musikschriftensteller. Ein Beitrag zur Musikanschauung des
Barock (Marpurg: Gorich & Weiershiiuser, 1969),348,350-51, tables 16a-b, 17a-c. For a full
transcription and facsimile reproduction, see Howard M. Schott, "A Critical Edition of the
Works of].]. Froberger with Commentary" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1977), 85-98.
4 Scharlau, "Neue Quellenfunde," 50-51, and Athanasius Kircher, 39, 335, 550-51.
Scharlau's hypothesis has been adopted in Buelow's Froberger entry for The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, p. 839; in Henning Siedentopf, Johann Jakob Froberger. Leben
und Werk (Stuttgart: Stuttgarter Verlagskontor, 1977), 15; and in Froberger, Oeuvres computes
pour le clavecin, ed. Howard Schott 1 (Paris: Heugel, 1988), iii, vi, x.
5 Kircher, Musurgia, I: 465.
6 On the origin of this separation, which continued through the Middle Ages and Re-
naissance into the Baroque period, see the excerpts from Aristotle's Politics and Boethius's De
institutione musica, translated in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History (rpt ed.,
London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 17, 21, 85-86.
7
CLAUDIO ANNIBALDI
I first studied two series of manuscript sources, each covering the years
1637-41 and 1645-49, and integrated the data of one series with those of
the other. I perused the avvisi di Roma, the semiweekly newsletters from
Rome sent by specialized reporters to important clients in Italy and abroad,
and the so-called stati d 'anime, the sketchy volumes in which the Roman
parish priests recorded the inhabitants of their districts each Lent.7 I then
collated two sets of musical compositions in order to document the pos-
sible stylistic influences during his first Roman stay: his autograph key-
board pieces located in the Nationalbibliothek, Vienna,S and the Chigi
keyboard tablatures in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome (a set of
manuscript volumes deriving from the legacy of Frescobaldi's student
Leonardo Castellani, which includes pieces composed by the master for
teaching purposes).9 Finally, I went through two additional archival sources
in an attempt to document Froberger's relationships with Carissimi and
Kircher during his second visit to Rome-the small Carissimi archive and
the letters of Kircher, which are held, respectively, in the Roman archives
of the Pontificio Collegio Germanico Ungarico de Urbe and the Pontificia
Universita Gregoriana. As I had foreseen, I found no reference to Froberger
in the former source, but my findings in the latter led me to a thorough
revision of the current hypothesis on Froberger's apprenticeship with
Carissimi.
7 I did not peruse the stati d'anime of 1637, because in Lent 1637 Froberger was still in
Vienna. I did, however, peruse the stati d'anime of 1641, because Easter that year fell on 31
March, and he could well have been in Rome during Lent before returning to Vienna in
April.
S See the facsimile reproduction of A-Wn, Mus. Hss. 165560, 18706, and 18707 in 17th-
Century Keyboard Music, vol. 3, ed. Robert Hill (New York: Garland, 1988). Modern editions
are available in Froberger, Orgel- und Klavierwerke, ed. Guido Adler (Vienna: Breitkopf &
Hartel, 1893-1903; rpt, Graz: Akademisch Druck- & Verlagsanstalt, 1959), and in Schott's
edition cited in n. 4 above. The verity of the autograph of the Viennese manuscripts has
been deduced so far from secondary details, such as the locution "by his own hand" ("manu
propria") appearing at the end of most pieces.
9 See the facsimile reproduction of these invaluable sources in 17th-Century Keyboard
Music, vols. 1 and 15, ed. Alexander Silbiger (New York: Garland, 1988-89). Modern editions
of many pieces are included in Girolamo Frescobaldi, Keyboard Compositions Preserved in Manu-
script, ed. Richard W. Shindle (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1968), and in Seven-
teenth-Century Keyboard Music in the Chigi Manuscripts of the Vatican Library, ed. Harry B. Lincoln
(Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1968). For a reconstruction and history of the
Castellani archive, see Claudio Annibaldi, "Musical Autographs of Frescobaldi and His Entou-
rage in Roman Sources," Journal of the American Musicological Society 43, no. 3 (1990): 393-425.
8 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY
* * *
Froberger's wish to study with Frescobaldi in Rome is made apparent by
a detailed account of the conversations that the Obersthofmeister of Em-
peror Ferdinand III had in June 1637 with two personages of the imperial
court in Vienna-Father Johannes Gans, the emperor's confessor, and
Duke Federico Savelli, a Roman nobleman who in 1641 would succeed
Prince Scipione Gonzaga as imperial ambassador to the pope.IO Father
Gans was required by the Obersthofmeister to try to convert Froberger to
Catholicism, and he soon began this attempt,u Duke Savelli was asked for
information on two practical matters-how to pay Frescobaldi for his les-
sons to Froberger, and where the latter could be lodged in Rome. The
duke's answer to the first question is somewhat uncertain: he suggests that
Frescobaldi would be content with periodically receiving a gift from the
emperor but offers to write to his nephew in Rome, Prince Paolo Savelli,
asking him to arrange a more suitable agreement with the master. The
duke's answer to the second question is more precise: froberger's lodging
in Rome might be supplied by Frescobaldi, Prince Gonzaga, or the Savelli,
if the ambassador's household could not accommodate him.
The stati d'anime of the parish of San Lorenzo ai Monti, which recorded
Frescobaldi's family in 1638-41, do not include names of any of his stu-
dents,12 and the stati d'anime of San Nicola in Carcere, the parish of the
10 The document, which is held in the Vienna State Archive, has been published in La
Mara [Marie Lipsius], Musiker Briefe aus funf Jahrhunderten nach den Urhandschriften erstmalig
herausgegeben (. . .) mit den Namenzugen der Kunstler 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1886), 107;
Paul Nett!, "Zur Geschichte der kaiserlichen Hofmusikkappelle von 1636-1680," Studien zur
Musikwissenschaft 16 (1929): 74; Herwig Knaus, Der Musiker im Archivbestand des kaiserlichen
Obersthofmeisteramtes (1637-1705) 1 (Vienna: Bolhaus, 1967), 90-91.
II According to the Froberger entry for Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine
Enzyklopedie der Musik, ed. Friedrich Blume 4 (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1955),985, the musician's
conversion to Catholicism was a condition for his obtaining a leave to go to Rome and may
well have been accomplished there. This assumption, however, has no support but the well-
known anecdote told in Johann Mattheson, Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (Hamburg: Mattheson,
1740; rpt, ed. Max Schneider, Kassel: Barenreiter, 1969), 87-88, where Froberger's conver-
sion is ascribed to "N. Kappeler," a German musician who would have been among his
comrades in study in Rome. Furthermore, no "Kappeler" is recorded in the surviving archival
sources concerning the German community in seventeenth-century Rome, such as those
held in the archive of Santa Maria dell'Anima (a church near Piazza Navona, that enjoyed
for centuries the emperors' protection as the national German church in Rome), which I was
able to consult thanks to the courtesy of Dr. Johannes Nedbal, rector of the church, and of
the archivist Mrs. Hildegard Speciale.
12 Frederick Hammond, GirolamoFrescobaldi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988),81.
CLAUDIO ANNIBALDI 9
Savelli palace at the Teatro Marcello, seem to be lost. I therefore focused
on Prince Gonzaga's palace, whose location in Piazza Navona is testified by
an avviso di Roma of January 1640 concerning the wedding of the prince
and a Roman widow,13 and I succeeded in both identifYing the palace with
a building that still exists in this famous square (figures 1 and 2) 14 and
discovering in the stati d 'anime of a church nearby a 1640 list of residents in
the imperial ambassador's palace, which includes a "signor GiovanJacomo
15
from Germany," who is most likely Johann Jakob Froberger.
I then sought to reconstruct some of the musical events that Froberger
might have attended in Rome in 1640. The avvisi reporting on Prince
Gonzaga's wedding mention a concert that took place on 1 January 1640
16
in honor of the married couple. Although they mention only the hiring
of the celebrated sopranos Loreto Vittori and Marc'Antonio Pasqualini,
the reference to ''various symphonies of sound" (''varie sinfonie di suoni")-
a phrase usually referring to instrumental music-suggests that the con-
cert included a number of instrumentalists. If so, it is possible that
Froberger, a virtuoso player as well as a member of the bridegroom's
household, not only attended the concert but also participated in it.
More certain is his attendance at Frescobaldi's performances, which in
1640 included the weekly services of the musical chapel of San Pietro in
Vaticano as well as the Lenten oratorios patronized by the Arciconfraternita
del Santissimo Crocifisso. The importance of the art of improvisation for
any instrumentalist of the time, as well as the well-known ability of
Frescobaldi in such an art, suggests strongly that attending his perfor-
mances was a part of Froberger's apprenticeship with the master. Indeed,
Andre Maugars, a French viola player who heard Frescobaldi improvising
at the Crocifisso oratorios during these very years, wrote enthusiastically
that all French organists should come to Rome to listen to his improvised
toccatas "full of contrapuntal devices and admirable inventions."17
13 I-Rvat, Ottob. lat. 3342, fo!' 2v.
14 The feature that enabled me to locate the Gonzaga palace in modern Piazza Navona
was the covered balcony that has distinguished the building from the surrounding ones since
the seventeenth century. See Piazza Navona. Isola dei Pamphilj (Rome: Spada. 1978), 247-67.
15 Rome, Archivio storico del Vicariato, S. Biagio della Fossa, St. d'An. 8 (1633-40), fols.
104-05. The volume also contains the lists of the residents in the ambassador's palace during
Lent in 1639 and in 1641, but neither mentions any "signor Giovan Jacomo tedesco." It
should be noted, however, that the ambassador left Rome after Easter 1640. Thus, the list of
1641 concerns only the entourage of his wife. The loss of the stati d'anime of San Nicola in
Carcere precludes us from excluding the possibility that at some time around Lent 1640
Froberger had dwelt in the Savelli palace at the Teatro Marcello.
16 I-Rvat, Ottob.lat. 3342, fols. 10-lOv (undated).
17 Hammond, Frescobaldi, 91-92
10 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY
Figure 1: An engraving of Piazza Navona, Rome, in the 1630s along with the relevant caption
describing the building no. 7 as Francesco De Cupis' s palace, which was rented by the imperial
ambassador to the pope (photograph by the Biblioteca Vaticana from Pompilio Totti, Ritratto
di Roma moderna [Rome: Mascardi, 1638], 232-33)
We can gain further insight into Frescobaldi's relationship with his
students in general and with Froberger in particular from the financial
records of 1640 for San Pietro in Vaticano and the Crocifisso-especially
those referring to musical events requiring more than one keyboard player,
such as the magnificent music for five choruses that was performed in San
CLAUDIO ANNIBALDI 11
Figure 2: A view of Piazza Navona, Rome, in 1990. On the right, the fifteenth-century De Cupis
palace (photograph by Marzio Marzot)